Toyota sign at Wrigley nothing short of ugly

June 13, 2010|By Blair Kamin

The new Toyota sign at Wrigley Field is uglier than expected.

The controversial sign, which the Cubs hastily erected after receiving City Council approval Wednesday, is a wart on the face of baseball's grande dame — a highly visible intrusion of advertising into a ballpark that fans prize precisely because it provides relief from ad clutter.

The public got its first look at the sign Friday as the Cubs and the White Sox squared off in what used to be called the Crosstown Classic and is now known, in another bow to the almighty dollar, as the BP Crosstown Cup. Leave it to the Cubs to associate themselves with sponsors — one reviled for its recalled cars, the other for its oil spill — who reinforce the team's reputation as perennial losers.

Rising some 50 feet above the sidewalk, the sign consists of two steel posts holding up letters that spell out "Toyota" and the company's ubiquitous, three-ovaled logo. The sign is not quite at the back of the left-field bleachers, as the Cubs originally planned, but a few feet inward — a shift that allowed city officials to wink, nod and say it was really an interior sign and therefore not affected by exterior signage limits at Wrigley.

Anyone who looks at the sign from Waveland Avenue will instantly recognize this line of reasoning for what it was: pure fiction. The sign, which looms over the bleachers, is no more an interior sign than the Cubs are a first-place team.

The two support posts are stubby and boxy, like squared-off versions of Gumby. They don't come close to matching the handsomely proportioned, highly articulated steel used in Wrigley's elegant rooftop light standards or elsewhere around the ballpark. But at least the posts are painted a dark green, matching Wrigley's trademark hues, instead of the initial plans for shrieking red.

The Toyota logo and letters, which are a more muted red as they face inward to the ballpark, still look completely out of place. A little red is OK at Wrigley as an accent color, as in the discreet "Hey Hey" signs on the foul poles. Anything more than that is a splotch of intensity and aggression in a ballpark that is, as its name implies, a park-like setting that wraps you in an embrace of green. (Thankfully, the backside of the logo and letters, facing Waveland, is green.)

The sign's assorted parts create a whole that is glaringly vertical, rudely interrupting the nearly continuous horizontal sweep of the bleachers that was supposed to be protected by Wrigley's official city landmark status. Shame on the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, the appointed guardians of Chicago's historic treasures, for approving the sign. All the commission's staff did was perfume the pig, insisting on tweaks, like replacing internal illumination for the sign with small projecting light fixtures that mimic those on Wrigley's centerfield scoreboard.

In any other ballpark, a sign like this would not matter. But Wrigley is not any other ballpark. Designed by Zachary Taylor Davis and opened in 1914, with additions by such distinguished architects as Holabird & Root, it is the second-oldest ballpark in the major leagues — Boston's Fenway Park is older by two years — and a beloved throwback.

The ballpark, perfectly ordered and pastoral, is Edenic. Its surrounding neighborhood, chaotic and commercial, suggests Paradise Lost. One is sacred, the other profane. The sharply defined tension between these opposites is what gives Wrigley its uniquely powerful sense of place. The sign doesn't destroy that identity, but it's hardly the innocuous insertion that Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts claimed it would be. The best one can say about it is that it's not permanent. It could be taken down as quickly as it was put up.

And that's worth thinking about because, in three years, the Cubs' ill-considered deal with Toyota will run out.

Why is the sign there in the first place? If you believe the Cubs, it's not there to obscure the view of a gaudy Horseshoe Casino sign on the roof of a building at the northeast corner of Waveland and Kenmore Avenues. It's there, in the team's view, to mine that particular location for what it's worth.

Elsewhere around Wrigley, the Cubs get a 17 percent cut of rooftop owners' gross revenues. At the northeast corner of Waveland and Kenwood, there are no rooftop seats — and, thus, no team income. The building with the Horseshoe Casino sign is like a gap in a row of teeth. Fill in that gap with an income-producing rooftop perch, perhaps even (hold on to your Cubbie blue hats) a tastefully designed electronic scoreboard, and you would do more than close the circle of the rooftops around Wrigley. You would do away with the financial incentive for the ugly Toyota sign.